Girolamo Savonarola

Girolamo Savonarola (21 September 1452-23 May 1498) was the de facto ruler of Florence from November 1494 to 23 May 1498, succeeding Piero de Medici and preceding Pier Soderini. Savonarola was a fanatical Catholic monk who expelled the House of Medici and established a popular republic, only to be excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI and hanged in 1498.

Biography
Girolamo Savonarola was born in Ferrara, Duchy of Ferrara on 21 September 1452, and he travelled to Bologna in 1475, where he became a monk. He took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and he became a lector at the Convent of San Marco in Florence in 1482. For the next several years, he became an itinerant preacher with a message of repentance, and he began to see himself as a prophet. He claimed that a new Cyrus the Great would come over the mountains to begin a renewal of the Catholic Church, and his prophecy proved correct when King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494. Savonarola sided with the French king, and he ousted the House of Medici from power that same year. Savonarola and the French set up a popular republic in Florence, and Savonarola pledged to turn Florence into the new Jerusalem, a world center of Christianity, and a more rich and powerful city than it had ever been. In 1495, he was summoned to Rome by Pope Alexander VI for refusing to join the "Holy League" against France during the Italian War of 1494-98, and he instead preached under a ban, started the Bonfire of the Vanities to burn all secular art and culture, denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule, and exploitation of the poor, leading to his excommunication in 1497. Savonarola later insisted that he was a miracle worker, but when rivals within clergy demanded that he undergo a trial by fire to prove it, he had the trial delayed until it rained, and he cancelled the trial. The people discovered that he was a fraud, and they proceeded to have him arrested. On 23 May 1498, he was hanged and his body burned.